James Paige

Current mood: Alive

While I was watching Ryda play Baldur’s Gate II last night, it occured to me how incredibly useful it would be to have the powers of a necromancer in real life.

When I get to work in the morning, I would summon a skelleton, and say; Skully! Read and file my e-mail! And save anything important for me., and then skully would say yessss master.

Then I would be working on a programming project, and somebody would come to me with a spreadsheet project, and I would be all Skully! Do this boring spreadsheet for me!, and Skully would say Yessss master. Being an unholy damned creature of the netherworld, I have a natural proficiency with Microsoft Excel, and then I would say; But Skully, this is OpenOffice.org running on Debian GNU/Linux, and Skully would go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh!!! and he would catch fire and crumble into ash, and then I would be bummed, because I would have to use up half my mana summoning a new Skully, and then I wouldn’t have enough mana left over at lunch time to cast Fire 3 to heat up my Cup-O-Noodles, and I would have to walk all the way down to the break room to use the stupid microwave.

Current mood: Floatey

Last night, the spirit of Salvador Dali appeared to me in a dream, in which he implored me to do more to support the consumer economy.

Dali: James! I come with a prophesy of Doooooom!

James: What!? Huh? What is happening to me? Where did you come from? Am I dreaming?

Dali: Not a deam, James. This is a vision! I come to you with a dire warning!

James: What must I do to save myself, oh Salvador Dali?

Dali: You need to drink more Sprite™! Spriiiiiiite™!

James: What?

Dali: You have been drinking water! I have been watching you from the spirit world, and all you drink is water!

James: That’s not true! I drank a glass of Strawberry/White-Cranberry last night. That isn’t water!

Dali: Your roommate purchased that! it doesn’t count.

James: So what is the big deal? What is wrong with water?

Dali: When you buy Sprite™, you support the Coca-Cola™ corporation, and stimulate the economy. Only by purchasing expensive sugary artifical beverage-flavoured drinks can we ensure the financial stability of the American economy for future generations!

James: Um… I don’t think th–

Dali: Think of the children!

James: But, I–

Dali: Think of the children!! (shakes fist)

James: But I drink bottled water! I pay for it. Doesn’t that stimulate the economy too?

(Salvador Dali emits a piercing shriek, and his head spins around on his neck)

Dali: Heretic! I saw you! I watch you! I have seen what you do!

James: No! That’s impossible! You can’t know that!

Dali: Yes, I have seen it! You purchased one bottle of Dasani™ purified water back in 2002, and you have been re-filling it from the tap ever since!

James: (screams) It’s true! I’m sorry, Salvador Dali! Have mercy on me!

And then I woke up in a cold sweat.

Current mood: Apathyphobic

Today, I am going to sculpt a sculpture from clay, another from alabaster. I will draw a few sketches, finish a short story I have started previously and start writing a new one. I will read the rest of that giant Neal Stephenson novel I am working my way through. I will piece together the black-primed burned wood fragments I prepared last weekend, and paint a picture on them and mount them above the couch. I will clean my apartment and do the dishes and vacuum. I will run three miles. I will go to the swap meet. I will make phone calls to friends I haven’t seen in ages, and catch up on their lives. Then I will spend the evening programming, an hour and a half on an old project, and hour and a half on a new project. I will bake something.

… or at least I will lay on the couch with the windows closed and the lights off and think about doing all those things.

Actually, I will be happy if I do just one of those things. I will be very unhappy if I do zero of them.

Monday Morning Edit: Yay! I did two-and-a-half of those things, and therefore I am happy!

Current mood: Dusty

This weekend I will be unable to post any blog entries, because i am leaving on vacation to go to Dino-Bungee National Monument, where I will bask in patriotic awe of the awe-inspiringly awesome megasculptural monolith that is Mount Rushmore, after which I shall bungee-jump from Lincoln‘s nose. Originally I was planning on jumping from Washington‘s nose, but then I read in the brocure that the decent takes you just three and a half feet from his strong jutting chin, so you must jump with absolute precision to avoid simultaneously killing yourself and defacing a national treasure. They reccomend that only for advanced bungee jumpers, and since this is my first time, I think I will stick with good ‘ol Abe.

After that, I will tour the rest of the National Park, and see the National Park Service‘s bone-chilling re-creation of a bygone age millions of years ago, when the virgin continent of North America was terrorized by large plaster replicas of dinosaurs.

Current mood: Less sick than I thought I would be

I saw a dead lizard on the ground in the parking area this morning. It was laying in a circle position with it’s tail near its mouth, as if in death, symbolizing the cyclic nature of life. I think it was an omen. If it starts raining fish today, I am going home sick.

Current mood: Belly full of spice

My cousin Brian works for a game company, which semi-recently published a game called Wik: Fable of Souls which is pretty much the definitve work in the field of tongue-swinging-action-puzzle games… that is to say, it is the entire genre. If you are into games, you will know how tremendoulsy unoriginal and derivative 99 percent of games are out there (even the good ones), so making a game in that 1 percent that is unique and original, is pretty darn cool. They actually won a bunch of awards for it at the Independant Games Festival at the 2005 IGC in San Francisco.

[Image redacted due to internettyness]
All modern awards ceremonies are slaves to the Oscars Meme, so naturally whenever they won, they came up on stage to accept their award and say a few words into the microphone.

On their third trip to the stage, my other cousin, Andrew joined them, in spite of the fact that he does not work for the company, was not involved in the making of the game, and was only there to support his brother. This delights me. It delights me enough to blog it ;)

Guess who is who :)

Current mood: Embarrassed and Hungry

So a fellow student in my sculpture class was working on a life-size torso. Just the torso, no head, arms, or anything south of the bellybutton. She had named it “Shark Attack” but felt the name was too traumatic, and was trying to think of another name.

I offered that I thought “Shark Attack” was a great name for it.

“You see, the thing about shark attacks is, as horrible, horrible, horrible an idea as it is, shark attacks are funny!”

“What?” she goes.

“It just automatically sounds tongue-in-cheek. Shark attacks are funny. You can’t take them seriously.”

I could see she wasn’t buying it. In fact, she was looking at me funny.

“Maybe because it is so rare?” I offered, “I mean, I know people have died that way, but, like” I searched for an appropriate hyperbole comparing shark attack victims to lightening strike victims or lottery winners, but came up dry.

“No, I don’t think so.” she says. Her friend shakes her head with a slightly disgusted look on her face.

“Is it just me?” I asked, reddening. Do I just have a sick mind?

A while later I realized what it was. When I think of shark attacks, my entire mental and emotional context for the concept comes from Gary Larson. Darn you Gary! You have made me look like a psychopath one too many times!

Today is a beautiful day. It is a good day for painting things that have been burned. I wonder why fire is not more popular in art. Pyromania is so artsy.

I am currently eating potstickers and california rolls, and thinking about how to use perl compatable regular expression rules (regex’s) to guess the appropriate material code and oversize value for a set of human-readable price page filenames. That is the sort of stuff I do at work. Today is a very good day.